A stay-at-home mom recently e-mailed me. She is a former CAM user who once treated her infant’s colic with homeopathy but has since seen the light and is now thinking skeptically. She asked that I look into the dōTERRA company, seller of essential oils: concentrated extracts distilled from plants, containing the “essence” or distinctive odor of the plant. She said:

…moms, well educated and seemingly rational moms, will believe anything. This isn’t a big deal if we are talking about sugar pills trying to cure crying that has no cause. However, I recently attended a dōTERRA “talk” (aka pressure to buy) about how essential oils can cure everything and anything, including one woman’s mother’s skin cancer. I didn’t want to offend this mom by calling her a quack, so I walked away spending 60 bucks on oils to be polite (this was the least amount I could spend and I used these oils to make my home smell nice, even though they were intended to solve all sorts of skin and digestive problems. I didn’t want to use them without knowing if they actually worked).

Instead of stressing the aromas, the focus was on the need to spend hundreds of dollars on these products to keep your family healthy. A handout showed how you could replace everything in your medicine cabinet with an essential oil alternative. She said:

The reps talked about how conventional medicine failed them and how they never go to the doctor anymore because the oils are a better cure.

Isagenix is a wellness system sold by multilevel marketing. It consists of a suite of products to be used in various combinations for “nutritional cleansing,” detoxification, and supplementation to aid in weight loss, improve energy and performance, and support healthy aging. It allegedly burns fat while supporting lean muscle, maintains healthy cholesterol levels, supports telomeres, improves resistance to illness, reduces cravings, improves body composition, and slows the aging process. And makes millions for distributors who got on the bandwagon early and are high on the pyramid.

My biggest concern with Isagenix was that it had not been clinically tested. They claimed that clinical tests were in progress (funded by Isagenix). An e-mail correspondent recently told me I should take another look at Isagenix, since a clinical study had been completed. It had not yet been published, and I asked her to get back to me when it was. Ask and you shall receive (but you may be sorry!). She contacted me when the study by Kroeger et al. was published in the journal Nutrition and Metabolism. The full study is available online and I urge readers to click on the link and look at Table 2, which I will be referring to later. The journal is peer-reviewed but, as will become painfully obvious, the peer reviewers did not do a competent job. It is an open-access online journal with a low impact factor. The authors had to pay to get their article published: it cost them $1805.